The observation of a new type of pentaquark and the first duo of tetraquarks at CERN, the Geneva-area home to the Large Hadron Collider, offers a new angle to assess the “strong force” that holds together the nuclei of atoms.

Most exotic hadrons, which are subatomic particles, are made up of two or three elemental particles known as quarks. The strong force is one of four forces known in the universe, along with the “weak force” — which applies to the decay of particles — as well as the electromagnetic force and gravity.

The announcement comes amid a flurry of activity this week at CERN: Also Tuesday, the LHC’s underground ring of superconducting magnets that propel infinitesimal particles along a 27-kilometer (about 17-mile) circuit and at near light speed, began smashing them together again. Data from the collisions is snapped up by high-tech detectors along the circular path.

The so-called “Run 3” of collisions, ending a three-year pause for maintenance and other checks, is operating at an unprecedented energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts, which will offer the prospect of new discoveries in particle physics.

CERN scientists hailed a smooth start to what is expected to be nearly four years of operation in “Run 3” — the third time the LHC has carried out collisions since its debut in 2008.

A day earlier, CERN celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the confirmation of the Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that has a central place in the so-called Standard Model that explains the basics of particle physics.

After one successful communication and a second partial one on Monday, the space agency said it could no longer communicate with the spacecraft called Capstone. Engineers are trying to find the cause of the communications drop-off and are optimistic they can fix it, NASA spokesperson Sarah Frazier said Tuesday.

The spacecraft, which launched from New Zealand on June 28, had spent nearly a week in Earth orbit and had been successfully kick-started on its way to the moon, when contact was lost, Frazier said.

The 55-pound satellite is the size of a microwave oven and will be the first spacecraft to try out this oval orbit, which is where NASA wants to stage its Gateway outpost. Gateway would serve as a staging point for astronauts before they descend to the lunar surface.

The orbit balances the gravities of Earth and the moon and so requires little maneuvering and therefore fuel and allows the satellite — or a space station — to stay in constant contact with Earth.

The International Mathematical Union said Viazovska, who holds the chair in number theory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, was being honored for her research into geometric problems.

Viazovska, 37, said she was very humbled to receive the prize for her work, which she said addresses a “very old and natural question,” namely the densest way to pack identical spheres.

While many people are familiar with the problem having seen cantaloupes stacked like a pyramid in a supermarket, Viazovska took it to another dimension — the eighth and 24th, to be precise — solving it in a way that drew widespread praise from top mathematicians.

“This is actually a very useful tool used in many areas of technology,” she told The Associated Press.

Viazovska said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 had profoundly changed her life and those of all Ukrainians.

“Ukraine is my native country and seeing how it’s being destroyed, how many lives are lost … of course, it’s all very difficult,” she said.

The other winners were French mathematician Hugo Duminil-Copin of the University of Geneva; Korean-American mathematician June Huh of Princeton; and British mathematician James Maynard of the University of Oxford.

The Fields Medal is awarded every four years to mathematicians under age 40. The recipients are normally announced at the International Congress of Mathematicians, which was originally due to be held in Russia this year but moved to Helsinki instead.

“The ongoing barbaric war that Russia still continues to wage against Ukraine clearly shows that no other alternative was feasible,” said Carlos E. Kenig, the president of the International Mathematical Union.

Viazovska recently dedicated one of her lectures to Yulia Zdanovksa, a young Ukrainian mathematician and computer scientist from Kharkiv. who was killed in a Russian missile attack.

“When someone like her dies, it’s like the future dies,” Viazovska said. “Right now, Ukrainians are giving the highest price for our beliefs and for our freedom.”

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Karl Ritter contributed to this report from Unterseen, Switzerland.

The Gorgosaurus skeleton will highlight Sotheby’s natural history auction on July 28, the auction house said.

The Gorgosaurus was an apex carnivore that lived in what is now the western United States and Canada during the late Cretaceous Period. It predated its relative the Tyrannosaurus rex by 10 million years.

The specimen being sold was discovered in 2018 in the Judith River Formation near Havre, Montana, Sotheby’s said. It measures nearly 10 feet (3 meters) tall and 22 (6.7 meters) feet long.

All of the other known Gorgosaurus skeletons are in museum collections, making this one the only specimen available for private ownership, the auction house said.

“In my career, I have had the privilege of handling and selling many exceptional and unique objects, but few have the capacity to inspire wonder and capture imaginations quite like this unbelievable Gorgosaurus skeleton,” Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s global head of science and popular culture, said.

Sotheby’s presale estimate for the fossil is $5 million to $8 million.

In fact, layers of inspections by researchers have pointed to entirely something different — nursing home employees ushering in the virus every day — while investigators found administrators flouting staffing requirements or infection-control procedures.

Further, no Pennsylvania nursing home has leveled any such claim like Mastriano’s, and a national nursing home trade association has agreed with the findings of researchers who say the spread of the virus in nursing homes directly correlated to community spread.

Regardless, Mastriano has repeated the unfounded claim in front of friendly audiences, weaponizing COVID-19 in an effort to hurt Democrats in one of the nation’s most important governor’s races in this midterm election cycle.

Mastriano, a state senator and retired U.S. Army colonel who won the Republican nomination while trafficking in conspiracy theories, seemingly came out of nowhere to become a rising force in right-wing politics primarily by leading anti-shutdown rallies in the pandemic’s early days.

Opposition to the shutdowns and mask and vaccine mandates are a central plank in Mastriano’s campaign.

It is also a key line of attack for Mastriano against Democrats, including the party’s gubernatorial nominee, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, whose office helped defend Wolf’s pandemic policies against court challenges.

In the past two years, new research has piled up on how COVID-19 penetrated nursing homes.

The virus was largely introduced by asymptomatic workers in areas where the virus was heavily transmitted, researchers say.

“Our research has been pretty definitive that the most important factor in determining whether there’s an outbreak in the building is community prevalence, by far,” said Vincent Mor, a professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown University. “Nothing else comes close.”

David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, echoed that, saying, “I pretty strongly feel that staff were the dominant pathway to COVID entering these buildings.”

In the early days of the pandemic, nursing homes lacked the trained staff, testing supplies and personal protective equipment that could have helped them slow the spread, researchers say.

Nursing home administrators did not know if staff members were asymptomatic. But, they knew that staff had to handle residents returning from hospitals according to infection-control protocols, said R. Tamara Konetzka, a professor of health economics and health services research at the University of Chicago.

In addition, the number of employees coming and going every day from nursing homes — hundreds daily at some facilities — dwarfed the number of readmitted hospital patients, which may have been no more than a handful at each facility in the pandemic’s first months, Konetzka and other researchers said.

Some of Konetzka’s research included using cell phone data to track the movements of workers to compare it to the location of outbreaks.

Still, the unproven theory about hospital readmissions came up prominently in Mastriano’s May 17 primary victory speech.

Mastriano made it his prime example that Democrats are “extreme” — an attempt to counter criticism, including from some in his own party, that he is too extreme to win the fall general election.

“Only a Democrat could get away with failed policies, sending the sick into the homes killing thousands and get away with it,” Mastriano said.

Mastriano went on, saying, “they’re the ones that sent the sick back into the homes. Their policies, Democrat policies, and killed so many. That’s extreme.”

Wolf’s office shot back, saying Mastriano’s claims are “patently false.”

Mastriano, Wolf’s office said, is a “science denier” who “put lives in danger throughout the pandemic by openly downplaying the crisis and opposing vaccines and other mitigation efforts.”

Mastriano has seized on a couple aspects of Pennsylvania’s handling of the pandemic.

One, Pennsylvania has reported more nursing home COVID-19 deaths than any other state, according to federal data — although researchers have raised questions about whether states counted COVID-19 deaths the same way and Pennsylvania has a disproportionately large nursing home population.

Two, Wolf’s administration — like those of several other Democratic governors in hard-hit states — issued orders requiring nursing homes to continue accepting residents returning from hospitals to guard against overwhelmed hospitals.

Last week, Mastriano posted a meme on social media that accuses Wolf and other governors whose administrations issued a similar order of “premeditated murder” — another baseless claim.

Wolf’s administration argued that the order also required nursing homes to be able to protect other residents and that it worked with nursing homes that had concerns, it said.

In any case, readmissions were routine in every state and nursing homes were given guidance early on by the federal government and trade associations on how to handle hospital readmissions.

That’s because, in every state, hospitals had to off-load recovering patients to ensure they had beds for incoming patients, researchers say.

A Department of Justice inquiry begun in 2020 into those orders — during the final stretch of the presidential campaign under former President Donald Trump — ended quietly under President Joe Biden last summer.

Researchers pointed out that states that got hit by the pandemic after Pennsylvania were still unable to protect their nursing home populations, even though they’d had more warning and didn’t have a policy of ordering nursing homes to accept readmissions.

COVID-19’s spread in nursing homes “was much a bigger problem than any policy could have caused,” Konetzka said.

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Follow Marc Levy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/timelywriter.

Extreme heat is also battering Japan, and volatile weather is causing trouble for other parts of the world in what scientists say has all the hallmarks of climate change, with even more warming expected this century.

The northeastern provinces of Shandong, Jilin and Liaoning saw precipitation rise to the highest levels ever recorded in June, while the national average of 112.1 millimeters (4.4 inches) was 9.1 % higher than the same month last year, the China Meteorological Administration said in a report Tuesday.

The average temperature across the nation also hit 21.3 degrees Celsius (70.34 Fahrenheit) in June, up 0.9 C (1.8 F) from the same period month last year and the highest since 1961. No relief is in sight, with higher than usual temperatures and precipitation forecast in much of the country throughout July, the administration said.

In the northern province of Henan, Xuchang hit 42.1 C (107.8 F) and Dengfeng 41.6 C (106.9 F) on June 24 for their hottest days on record, according to global extreme weather tracker Maximiliano Herrera.

China has also seen seasonal flooding in several parts of the country, causing misery for hundreds of thousands, particularly in the hard-hit south that receives the bulk of rainfall as well as typhoons that sweep in from the South China Sea.

China is not alone in experiencing higher temperatures and more volatile weather. In Japan, authorities warned of greater than usual stress on the power grid and urged citizens to conserve energy.

Japanese officials announced the earliest end to the annual summer rainy season since the national meteorological agency began keeping records in 1951. The rains usually temper summer heat, often well into July.

On Friday, the cities of Tokamachi and Tsunan set all-time heat records while several others broke monthly marks.

Large parts of the Northern Hemisphere have seen extreme heat this summer, with regions from the normally chilly Russian Arctic to the traditionally sweltering American South recording unusually high temperatures and humidity.

In the United States, the National Weather Service has held 30 million Americans under some kind of heat advisory amid record-setting temperatures. The suffering and danger to health is most intense among those without air conditioning or who work outdoors, further reinforcing the economic disparities in dealing with extreme weather trends.

It’s been an unusual journey already for the Capstone satellite. It was launched six days ago from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula by the company Rocket Lab in one of their small Electron rockets. It will take another four months for the satellite to reach the moon, as it cruises along using minimal energy.

Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck told The Associated Press it was hard to put his excitement into words.

“It’s probably going to take a while to sink in. It’s been a project that has taken us two, two-and-a-half years and is just incredibly, incredibly difficult to execute,” he said. “So to see it all come together tonight and see that spacecraft on its way to the moon, it’s just absolutely epic.”

Beck said the relatively low cost of the mission — NASA put it at $32.7 million — marked the beginning of a new era for space exploration.

“For some tens of millions of dollars, there is now a rocket and a spacecraft that can take you to the moon, to asteroids, to Venus, to Mars,” Beck said. “It’s an insane capability that’s never existed before.”

If the rest of the mission is successful, the Capstone satellite will send back vital information for months as the first to take a new orbit around the moon called a near-rectilinear halo orbit: a stretched-out egg shape with one end of the orbit passing close to the moon and the other far from it.

Eventually, NASA plans to put a space station called Gateway into the orbital path, from which astronauts can descend to the moon’s surface as part of its Artemis program.

Beck said the advantage of the new orbit is that it minimizes fuel use and allows the satellite — or a space station — to stay in constant contact with Earth.

The Electron rocket that launched June 28 from New Zealand was carrying a second spacecraft called Photon, which separated after nine minutes. The satellite was carried for six days in Photon, with the spacecraft’s engines firing periodically to raise its orbit farther and farther from Earth.

A final engine burst Monday allowed Photon to break from Earth’s gravitational pull and send the satellite on its way. The plan now is for the 25-kilogram (55-pound) satellite to far overshoot the moon before falling back into the new lunar orbit Nov. 13. The satellite will use tiny amounts of fuel to make a few planned trajectory course corrections along the way.

Beck said they would decide over the coming days what to do with Photon, which had completed its tasks and still had a bit of fuel left in the tank.

“There’s a number of really cool missions that we can actually do with it,” Beck said.

For the mission, NASA teamed up with two commercial companies: California-based Rocket Lab and Colorado-based Advanced Space, which owns and operates the Capstone satellite.

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Find more AP Science coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/science

The latest mass shooting came as the nation tried to find cause to celebrate its founding and the bonds that still hold it together. It was supposed to be a day for taking off work, flocking to parades, devouring hot dogs and burgers at backyard barbecues and gathering under a canopy of stars and exploding fireworks.

“On a day that we came together to celebrate community and freedom, we are instead mourning the tragic loss of life and struggling with the terror that was brought upon us,” Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering said.

The Highland Park parade began around 10 a.m. but was suddenly halted 10 minutes later after shots were fired. Hundreds of parade-goers — some visibly bloodied — fled the area, leaving behind chairs, baby strollers and blankets. Authorities brought a person of interest into custody Monday evening.

As the Highland Park community mourned, fireworks began thundering in neighboring towns and across the country. Pyrotechnics bloomed shortly after nightfall in Boston and New York City, where a kaleidoscope of color exploded over the Hudson River and illuminated skyscrapers.

President Joe Biden, in remarks Monday celebrating 246 years of America’s independence, sought to reassure a nation both exhausted and unsettled by recent events.

“In recent days, there’s been reason to think this country is moving backwards, that freedom is being reduced, that rights we assumed were protected are no longer,” Biden said in remarks to military families and administration officials enjoying a picnic on the South Lawn of the White House. “I know it can be exhausting and unsettling, but tonight I want you to know we’re going to get through all of this.”

Biden said many people see a divided country, but “I believe we are more united than we are divided.”

He tweeted earlier in the day about the shooting, calling it “senseless gun violence that has yet again brought grief to an American community this Independence Day.”

“I will not give up fighting the epidemic of gun violence,” the president tweeted.

These are precarious times: An economic recession lurks, and the Highland Park shooting will weigh on a national psyche already raw from mass shootings like those seen recently at a Texas elementary school and a New York supermarket.

Sharp social and political divisions have also been laid bare by recent Supreme Court decisions overturning the constitutional right to abortion and striking down a New York law limiting who may carry a gun in public.

Nevertheless, many had reason to gather and celebrate for the first time in three years amid easing coronavirus precautions.

Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest returned to its traditional location in Brooklyn’s Coney Island neighborhood after two years elsewhere thanks to the pandemic.

“It’s beautiful to be back here,” Joey “Jaws” Chestnut told ESPN after winning the men’s competition by downing 63 hot dogs and buns — even as he momentarily put a protester who rushed the stage in a chokehold. Miki Sudo chomped 40 franks to win the women’s event.

Colorful displays were scheduled to light up the night sky from coast to coast. However, others, particularly in drought-stricken and wildfire-prone regions of the West, would forgo them.

Fireworks were the suspected cause behind a fire in Centerville, Utah, that led to the evacuation of dozens of homes and the cancellation of some of its Independence Day events, officials said.

It was a different matter in Phoenix, which is again going without fireworks — not because of the pandemic or fire concerns but supply-chain issues.

In emotional ceremonies across the country, some swore oaths of citizenship, qualifying them to vote in the upcoming midterm elections.

During a ceremony for naturalized citizens held at Mount Vernon, the Virginia home of George Washington, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told 52 people originally from 42 different countries that they were essential to building a strong labor force.

“Immigrants strengthen our workforce, and, in the process, help drive the resiliency and vitality of our economy,” Yellen said in remarks prepared for the Monday event.

For many, July 4 was also a chance to set aside political differences and to celebrate unity, reflecting on the revolution that gave rise to history’s longest-living democracy.

“There’s always something to divide or unite us,” says Eli Merritt, a political historian at Vanderbilt University whose upcoming book traces the fraught founding of the United States.

But he sees the Jan. 6 hearings probing last year’s storming of the U.S. Capitol as a reason for hope, an opportunity to rally behind democratic institutions. Even though not all Americans or their elected representatives agree with the committee’s work, Merritt is heartened by the fact that it’s at least somewhat bipartisan.

“Moral courage as a locus for Americans to place hope, the willingness to stand up for what is right and true in spite of negative consequences to oneself,” he said. “That is an essential glue of constitutional democracy.”

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Calvan reported from New York, and Foody from Chicago. Associated Press reporters Michael Tarm and Roger Schneider in Highland Park, Illinois; Darlene Superville and Fatima Hussein in Washington; Stephen Groves in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Amy Beth Hanson in Helena, Montana; and Jennifer Peltz in New York contributed to this story.

“I hope the numbers stop here,” said Veneto Gov. Luca Zaia, whose region in northeast Italy borders the Dolomite mountain range including the Marmolada glacier. He spoke in the resort town of Canazei, where a morgue was set up in the ice rink.

Another regional leader, Maurizio Fugatti, said 14 people remained unaccounted for by Monday afternoon: 10 Italians, three from Czechia and one from Austria. Local officials later said that Austrian consular officials had made contact with the Austrian.

“We were contacted by families because these people didn’t return home,’” said Fugatti of the Trentino-Alto Adige Alpine region.

In the mountain’s parking lot, four cars remained whose occupants hadn’t been traced — two cars had license plates from Czechia; one vehicle was from Germany and the fourth was from Hungary.

At least three of the dead were Italians, authorities said. Italian news reports said one of the deceased was from Czechia, which is more widely known in English as the Czech Republic.

One of the Italians was Filippo Bari, 28, who snapped a selfie with the Marmolada glacier in the background only minutes before the avalanche, his brother, Andrea, told state TV in Canazei where he came to identify the body.

Although an expert mountain hiker, his brother said his family always told him to be careful in the mountains, “above all in these temperatures.” He said the selfie was sent only 20 minutes before the avalanche and that his brother, who had a partner and a 4-year-old son, was smiling. “He passed away doing what he loved.”

On Sunday, officials said nine people were injured, but on Monday told reporters in Canazei that eight were injured, including two in grave condition.

Zaia said the hospitalized included two Germans and a 40-year-old patient yet to be identified.

The avalanche came roaring down when dozens of hikers were on excursions, including some of them roped together.

Looking grim after meeting with families of some of the dead, Italian Premier Mario Draghi, demanded that action be taken so such a tragedy doesn’t happen again.

“This is a drama that certainly has some unpredictability, and certainly depends on environmental deterioration and the climate situation,” Draghi said, echoing several experts who said an avalanche triggered by a glacier’s breakup couldn’t be forecast.

Marmolada glacier has been shrinking for decades, and scientists at the government CNR research center have said it won’t exist within 25-30 years.

“Today, Italy cries for the victims, all Italians embrace them with affection,” Draghi said. “The government must reflect on what happened and take measures, so that what happened has a very low probability of happening again or being avoided entirely.”

The detached portion of glacier was massive, estimated at 200 meters wide, 80 meters tall and 60 meters deep. Zaia likened the avalanche to an “apartment building (sized) block of ice with debris and Cyclopean masses of rock.”

”I can’t say anything else other than the facts, and the facts tell us that the high temperatures don’t favor these situations,” Zaia told reporters.

Italy is in the grips of a weeks-long heat wave, and Alpine rescuers said that the temperature at the glacier’s altitude last week topped 10 C (50 F) when usually it should hover around freezing at this time of year.

What exactly caused a pinnacle of the glacier to break off and thunder down the slope at a speed estimated by experts at around 300 kph (nearly 200 mph), wasn’t immediately known.

But high temperatures were widely cited as a factor.

“The atmosphere and climate, especially below 3,500 meters, is at a complete imbalance thanks to the ‘new’ climate that we’ve been registering, and unfortunately these events are probably destined to repeat themselves in the coming years,” said Renato Colucci from the Institute of Polar Sciences in the state-run Council of National Research (CNR).

Jacopo Gabrieli, another glacier expert with CNR, told state television that the long heat wave, spanning May and June, was the hottest in northern Italy in that period for nearly 20 years — “absolutely an anomaly.”

Operators of rustic shelters along the mountainside said temperatures at the 2,000-meter (6,600 foot) level recently reached 24C (75 F) – unheard of in a place where excursionists go in summer to keep cool.

The glacier, in the Marmolada range, is the largest in the Dolomite mountains in northeastern Italy. People ski on it in the winter. But the glacier has been rapidly melting away over the past decades, with much of its volume gone.

The Mediterranean basin, which includes southern European countries like Italy, has been identified by U.N. experts as a “climate change hot spot,” likely to suffer heat waves and water shortages, among other consequences.

Pope Francis, who has made care of the planet a priority of his papacy, tweeted an invitation to pray for the avalanche victims and their families.

“The tragedies that we are experiencing with climate change must push us to urgently search for new ways that are respectful of people and nature,” Francis wrote.

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Frances D’Emilio reported from Rome.

Abortion procedures are an invasive medical technique that empties the womb. They are sometimes called surgical abortions, although they don’t involve surgery.

Abortion by pills involves the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol. As more states seek abortion limits, demand for the pills is expected to grow.

HOW THE DRUGS WORK

Mifepristone is taken first, swallowed by mouth. The drug dilates the cervix and blocks the effects of the hormone progesterone, which is needed to sustain a pregnancy.

Misoprostol, a drug also used to treat stomach ulcers, is taken 24 to 48 hours later. The pill is designed to dissolve when placed between the gums and teeth or in the vagina. It causes the uterus to cramp and contract, causing bleeding and expelling pregnancy tissue.

HOW THE DRUGS ARE USED

Abortion medication is approved for use up to the 10th week of pregnancy.

The pills may be taken in a doctor’s office or clinic, where patients sometimes have an ultrasound or lab tests beforehand. Some providers also offer the pills through telehealth visits and then send patients the medication by mail.

Use of the pills has been increasing in recent years. As of 2020, they accounted for 54% of all U.S. abortions, according to preliminary data from the Guttmacher Institute. The group’s final estimate is due later this year.

SIDE EFFECTS

Studies and real-use evidence show that when taken together, the pills are safe and up to 99% effective. Side effects may include nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

Bleeding is normal. Very heavy bleeding — soaking more than two pads an hour for more than two hours — is uncommon but requires medical attention.

Dr. Stephanie Rand, a New York ob-gyn and abortion specialist with the advocacy group Physicians for Reproductive Health, says pregnancy tests should not be used right away to determine if a medication abortion was successful because the pregnancy hormone may linger in the body for several weeks. Bleeding, with blood clots that include lighter colored tissue, are signs of success, she said.

Serious complications are very rare. The Food and Drug Administration says more than 3.7 million U.S. women have used mifepristone since it was approved more than 20 years ago. The agency has received 26 reports of deaths in women using the medication, including two involving ectopic pregnancies, which grow outside the womb.

The medications are not recommended for certain patients, including those with suspected ectopic pregnancies or with implanted IUD birth control devices.

COSTS

Costs vary by location but are similar to abortion procedures and may total more than $500. Health insurance coverage varies, with some plans making the pills free or low cost and others not covering them at all.

Mifepristone is sold under the brand name Mifeprex and misoprostol under the brand name Cytotec, but both pills are available as generics.

FEDERAL RULES

The FDA approved mifepristone to terminate pregnancy in 2000, when used with misoprostol. At the time, it imposed several limits on how the drug could be prescribed and dispensed.

In December, the agency dropped the biggest restriction: a requirement that patients pick up the medication in person. The FDA said a scientific review of the drug’s use — including during the COVID-19 pandemic — showed that women could safely receive the pills through the mail after an online consultation, without any increase in side effects or complications.

The decision allowed mail delivery of the pills nationwide, a change long-sought by medical professional groups and abortion-rights supporters.

Still, millions of women will have trouble accessing the pills due to a patchwork of state laws targeting abortion broadly and the pills specifically. About half of U.S. states are expected to ban or greatly restrict abortion.

LEGAL CONFLICTS

Legal experts foresee years of court battles over access to the pills, as abortion-rights proponents bring test cases to challenge state restrictions.

There are strong arguments and precedents on both sides, experts note, though little certainty about which side might prevail.

The Biden administration’s Justice Department has already signaled plans to challenge state restrictions on medication abortion. And federal lawyers are likely to be joined by outside parties, including abortion rights groups like Planned Parenthood and even the companies that make the pills.

The chief argument against pill restrictions is likely to be the longstanding principle that federal laws, including FDA decisions, preempts state laws. Indeed, few states have ever tried to fully ban an FDA-approved drug because of past rulings in the agency’s favor.

Still, states with blanket abortion bans are likely to interpret them as barring abortion pills. Many of the laws don’t distinguish between abortion procedures and medication abortion.

“In the short term, those states that ban abortion are going to assume that their bans also include medication abortion and that will be prohibited,” said Greer Donley, a professor specializing in reproductive health care at the University of Pittsburgh Law School.

STATE LAWS ON THE PILLS

Even if blanket bans are successfully challenged, more than 30 states have laws specifically restricting access to abortion pills. For example, 19 states require that clinicians be physically present when the drug is administered.

Those laws could withstand court challenges. States have long had authority over how physicians, pharmacists and other providers practice medicine.

States also set the rules for telemedicine consultations used to prescribe medications. Generally that means health providers in states with restrictions on abortion pills could face penalties, such as fines or license suspension, for trying to send pills through the mail.

Women have already been traveling across state lines to places where abortion pill access is easier. That trend is expected to increase.

Meanwhile, some women will still get the medication via online pharmacies in Canada and overseas, often with telehealth consultations from foreign doctors. The practice is technically illegal but essentially unenforced, and advocates believe women will increasingly choose this method as more states move to ban abortions.

“Anti-abortion states are going to do everything they can to restrict medication abortion, but practically speaking people have been and will continue to access it through the mail from international pharmacies,” Donley said.

YEARS OF UNCERTAINTY

Donley expects lawsuits based on various legal theories to play out for a few years before any clear decisions emerge.

One key question is how the nation’s top court might rule if and when it takes up those court cases. While the Supreme Court has rejected a constitutional right to abortion, conservative justices have also generally deferred to FDA’s primacy over drug decisions.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

COVID-19 is still killing hundreds of Americans each day, but is not nearly as dangerous as it was last fall and winter.

“It’s going to be a good summer and we deserve this break,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.

With more Americans shielded from severe illness through vaccination and infection, COVID-19 has transformed — for now at least — into an unpleasant, inconvenient nuisance for many.

“It feels cautiously good right now,” said Dr. Dan Kaul, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor. “For the first time that I can remember, pretty much since it started, we don’t have any (COVID-19) patients in the ICU.”

As the nation marks July Fourth, the average number of daily deaths from COVID-19 in the United States is hovering around 360. Last year, during a similar summer lull, it was around 228 in early July. That remains the lowest threshold in U.S. daily deaths since March 2020, when the virus first began its U.S. spread.

But there were far fewer reported cases at this time last year — fewer than 20,000 a day. Now, it’s about 109,000 — and likely an undercount as home tests aren’t routinely reported.

Today, in the third year of the pandemic, it’s easy to feel confused by the mixed picture: Repeat infections are increasingly likely, and a sizeable share of those infected will face the lingering symptoms of long COVID-19.

Yet, the stark danger of death has diminished for many people.

“And that’s because we’re now at a point that everyone’s immune system has seen either the virus or the vaccine two or three times by now,” said Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Over time, the body learns not to overreact when it sees this virus.”

“What we’re seeing is that people are getting less and less ill on average,” Dowdy said.

As many as 8 out of 10 people in the U.S. have been infected at least once, according to one influential model.

The death rate for COVID-19 has been a moving target, but recently has fallen to within the range of an average flu season, according to data analyzed by Arizona State University health industry researcher Mara Aspinall.

At first, some people said coronavirus was no more deadly than the flu, “and for a long period of time, that wasn’t true,” Aspinall said. Back then, people had no immunity. Treatments were experimental. Vaccines didn’t exist.

Now, Aspinall said, the built-up immunity has driven down the death rate to solidly in the range of a typical flu season. Over the past decade, the death rate for flu was about 5% to 13% of those hospitalized.

Big differences separate flu from COVID-19: The behavior of the coronavirus continues to surprise health experts and it’s still unclear whether it will settle into a flu-like seasonal pattern.

Last summer — when vaccinations first became widely available in the U.S. — was followed by the delta surge and then the arrival of omicron, which killed 2,600 Americans a day at its peak last February.

Experts agree a new variant might arise capable of escaping the population’s built-up immunity. And the fast-spreading omicron subtypes BA.4 and BA.5 might also contribute to a change in the death numbers.

“We thought we understood it until these new subvariants emerged,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, an infectious disease specialist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas.

It would be wise, he said, to assume that a new variant will come along and hit the nation later this summer.

“And then another late fall-winter wave,” Hotez said.

In the next weeks, deaths could edge up in many states, but the U.S. as a whole is likely to see deaths decline slightly, said Nicholas Reich, who aggregates coronavirus projections for the COVID-19 Forecast Hub in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We’ve seen COVID hospitalizations increase to around 5,000 new admissions each day from just over 1,000 in early April. But deaths due to COVID have only increased slightly over the same time period,” said Reich, a professor of biostatistics at University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Unvaccinated people have a six times higher risk of dying from COVID-19 compared with people with at least a primary series of shots, the CDC estimated based on available data from April.

This summer, consider your own vulnerability and that of those around you, especially in large gatherings since the virus is spreading so rapidly, Dowdy said.

“There are still people who are very much at risk,” he said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The modified jumbo jet took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in the Mojave Desert and released the rocket over the Pacific Ocean, northwest of Los Angeles.

The launch was procured by the U.S. Space Force for a Defense Department test program. The seven payloads will conduct various experiments.

“And there we have it, folks!” the company tweeted shortly before 1 a.m. local time, about an hour after the rocket separated from the 747. “NewtonFour successfully reignited and deployed all customer spacecraft into their target orbit.”

It was Virgin Orbit’s fourth commercial launch and first night launch. The launch was originally scheduled for Wednesday night, but that attempt was scrubbed due to a propellant temperature issue.

Virgin Orbit named the mission “Straight Up” after the hit on Paula Abdul’s debut studio album “Forever Your Girl,” which was released through Virgin Records in 1988.

Virgin Orbit was founded in 2017 by British billionaire Richard Branson. It is headquartered in Long Beach, California, and currently conducts launches from the Mojave airport but is planning international missions.

Later this year, the company will launch two satellites on a mission flying out of Newquay Airport in Cornwall, England. The satellites will conduct radio signal monitoring tests in a joint project of the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense and the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office.

Kerry spoke to The Associated Press after a major Supreme Court ruling Thursday limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s options for regulating climate pollution from power plants. The ruling raised the prospect the conservative-controlled court could go on to hinder other efforts by the executive branch to cut the country’s coal, oil and gas emissions. It came after Democrats failed in getting what was to be Biden’s signature climate legislation through the narrowly divided Senate.

The Biden administration is striving now to show audiences at home and abroad that the U.S. can still make significant climate progress, and strike deals with other countries to do the same. Scientists say only a few years are left to stave off the worst levels of global warming, triggering ever more deadly droughts, storms, wildfires and other disasters.

Kerry, Biden’s climate negotiator abroad, said he had not talked to foreign counterparts since the Supreme Court ruling, which some climate scientists called a gut punch and a disaster.

“But I’m confident they’ll ask me questions,” Kerry said. “But my answer is going to be look, we’re going to meet our goals … and the president is going to continue to fight for legislation from the Congress.”

“We absolutely are convinced we can meet our goals,” Kerry said.

Biden has pledged to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by the end of the decade and to have an emissions-free power sector by 2035. Despite two Democrats joining with Republicans to block what was supposed to have been transformative legislation moving the United States to cleaner energy, Biden has managed to free significant funding for electric charging stations and some other moves. The EPA has pledged to release alternative regulation to limit climate damage from the power sector early next year.

Kerry cited continuing progress in climate efforts abroad this year, including more governments committing to faster cuts in emissions and more signing a U.S.-backed methane pledge targeting climate-damaging leaks, venting and flaring from natural gas industries.

“This decision by the Supreme Court … is disappointing, but … it doesn’t take away our ability to do a whole bunch of things that we need to get done,” Kerry said.

“President Biden has enormous authority to continue to move forward. We are going to move forward. I am absolutely confident about our ability to continue to offer leadership on a global basis, which we’re doing right now.”

Kerry also pointed to progress the United States was making in cutting fossil fuel emissions independently of the government efforts, including through electric cars and other marketplace technological advances, and through clean-energy pushes from California and dozens of other states, mostly those led by Democrats.

Kerry described legislation on tax credits to encourage cleaner energy as common sense and doable. He declined to talk about the impact if even those failed to clear Congress.

“I wouldn’t be a gloomy-doomy over this,” he said. “I just say we got to work harder and fight harder.”

Asked if it was possible to ask China and other major polluters to make fast moves away from fossil fuels when the U.S. was struggling to meet some of its own goals, Kerry said, “they’ll make their own analysis. That will conceivably have an impact on what they decide to do or not.”

The administration’s setbacks getting major climate retooling through conservatives in Congress and the Supreme Court haven’t hurt the momentum he’s working for abroad in climate negotiations, Kerry insisted. “But I think it’s slowed the pace at which some of these things could happen,” he said.

“If the United States were able to accomplish more regarding our own goals, and we did so rapidly, that would put a lot of pressure on a lot of countries,” he said.

The Higgins landing craft that has long been 185 feet (56 meters) below the surface is now nearly halfway out of the water at Lake Mead.

The boat lies less than a mile from Lake Mead Marina and Hemingway Harbor.

It was used to survey the Colorado River decades ago, sold to the marina and then sunk, according to dive tours company Las Vegas Scuba.

Higgins Industries in New Orleans built several thousand landing craft between 1942 and 1945, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. Around 1,500 “Higgins boats” were deployed at Normandy on June 6, 1944, known as D-Day.

The boat is just the latest in a series of objects unearthed by declining water levels in Lake Mead, the largest human-made reservoir in the U.S., held back by the Hoover Dam. In May, two sets of human remains were found in the span of a week.

Experts say climate change and drought have led to the lake dropping to its lowest level since it was full about 20 years ago.

As water levels drop at both Lake Mead and Lake Powell upstream on the Arizona-Utah line, states in the U.S. West increasingly face deeper cuts to their supply from the Colorado River. The lower levels also impact hydropower produced at Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam, which holds back Lake Powell.

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton said last month that the agency would take action to protect the system if the seven states in the Colorado River basin don’t quickly come up with a way to cut the use of up to 4 million acre-feet of water — more than Arizona and Nevada’s share combined.

An acre-foot is about 325,850 gallons (about 1.23 million liters). An average household uses one-half to one acre-foot of water a year.

The two states, California and Mexico already have enacted voluntary and mandatory cuts. Water from some reservoirs in the upper basin — Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah — has been released to prop up Lake Powell.

Farmers use a majority of the river’s supply.

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This story has been corrected to show Lake Mead straddles the border of Nevada and Arizona.

Major legislation passed and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday aims to significantly reduce single-use plastic packaging in the state and drastically boost recycling rates for what remains. It sets the nation’s most stringent requirements for the use of plastic packaging, with lawmakers saying they hope it sets a precedent for other states to follow.

“We’re ruining the planet and we’ve got to change it,” Sen. Bob Hertzberg, a Democrat, said before voting on the bill.

Under the bill, plastic producers would have to reduce plastics in single-use products 10% by 2027, increasing to 25% by 2032. That reduction in plastic packaging can be met through a combination of reducing package sizing, switching to a different material or making the product easily reusable or refillable. Also by 2032, plastic would have to be recycled at a rate of 65%, a massive jump from today’s rates. It wouldn’t apply to plastic beverage bottles, which have their own recycling rules.

Efforts to limit plastic packaging have failed in the Legislature for years, but the threat of a similar ballot measure going before voters in November prompted business groups to come to the negotiating table. The measure’s three main backers withdrew it from the ballot after the bill passed, though they expressed concern the plastics industry will try to weaken the requirements.

States have passed bans on single-use plastic grocery bags, straws and other items, and plastic water bottles soon won’t be allowed in national parks. But the material is still ubiquitous, used in everything from laundry detergent and soap bottles to packaging for vegetables and lunch meats. Most plastic products in the United States are not recycled, with millions of tons ending up in landfills and the world’s oceans. It harms wildlife and shows up in drinking water in the form of microplastics.

Marine animals that live off the Pacific coast from crabs to whales are ingesting plastics that make their way into the ocean, said Amy Wolfrum, California ocean policy senior manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. She called the bill a “fantastic start” to addressing a major problem.

Plastic makers would form their own industry group tasked with developing a plan to meet the requirements, which would need approval from the state’s recycling department. They’ll be required to collect $500 million annually from producers for a fund aimed at cleaning up plastic pollution. Maine, Oregon and Colorado have similar producer responsibility systems.

It does not ban styrofoam food packaging but would require it to be recycled at a rate of 30% by 2028, which some supporters said is a de facto ban because the material can’t be recycled. The ballot measure would have banned the material outright. It would have given more power to the state recycling agency to implement the rules rather than letting industry organize itself.

Sen. Ben Allen, a Santa Monica Democrat who led negotiations on the bill, said it represented an example of two groups that are often at odds — environmentalists and industry — coming together to make positive change.

He called it a “strong, meaningful compromise that will put California at the forefront of addressing a major global problem.”

Though they withdrew their ballot initiative, the measure’s proponents said they remain concerned that industry will try to water down the bill. The initiative’s three backers were Linda Escalante of the Natural Resources Defense Council; Michael Sangiacomo, former head of the waste management company Recology; and Caryl Hart, a member of the California Coastal Commission.

Joshua Baca of the American Chemistry Council, which represents the plastics industry, said the bill unfairly caps the amount of post-consumer recycled plastic that can be used to meet the 25% reduction requirement and limits “new, innovative recycling technologies.”

The bill bans incineration and combustion of plastic, but leaves open the possibility for some forms of so-called chemical recycling.

Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, said while California’s bill goes farther than any other state when it comes to reducing plastic pollution, it still falls short. She said it will only result in about a 10% reduction in overall packaging because producers can make products refillable or switch to other materials. She also said that it relies too heavily on failed plastics recycling policies.

Plastic production is supposed to triple globally by 2050, she said.

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This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Amy Wolfrum’s name. It is Wolfrum, not Wolfram.